Brig. Gen. Steven Blaymaier, director of Air Mobility Command’s logistics, engineering and force protection, has said the C-130J military transport aircraft and the KC-135 refueling tanker are scheduled to enter the U.S. Air Force’s conditions-based maintenance program in 2019, Defense News reported Saturday.
CBM aims to increase mission-capable rates by predicting problems in aircraft components through the use of data analytics.
“As we move forward with conditions based maintenance plus (CBM+) and predictive analytics, we’ll be able to know by tail number which parts are going to fail on certain aircraft,” Blaymaier said in an interview at the Airlift Tanker Association symposium.
“It’ll be much more surgical [and] operational.”
He noted that the command will implement the CBM program for the KC-135 fleet in the spring of 2019 and C-130J by summer with plans to roll it out to other aircraft such as KC-10s and C-17s.
The service has fielded the CBM concept to AMC’s C-5 transport aircraft fleet and Air Force Global Strike Command’s B-1 bombers.
Â